Interviews

Call of Duty: Finest Hour Interview

To research the mission, we did a lot of reading and watched a tone of footage of the battle. Then, once we were sure the battle of Aachen was going to be a Finest Hour mission, we sent a couple of our artists on-location to Aachen to take photographs and get a sense of the city. This is the type of deep background familiarity that you can't get only by studying books or looking at movies. Many of the textures you see in the game are based on the photos we took of the actual buildings.

GameSpy: Are most of the missions in Finest Hour like this one, or are they all different?

Eric Church: One of the things we are most proud of is how different each of the missions in Finest Hour are to play. We wanted to make the differences between the roles the characters you play as great as possible, but keep each of them fun to play. So, there's a big variety of gameplay ranging from vehicle missions in tank or jeep to infantry, all keeping with the core Call of Duty tenets of intensity and the chaos of regular soldiers fighting together. And as I mentioned, with the large cast of characters, gamers will get a good feel from the different perspectives and the missions at hand.

GameSpy: How far along in the development process are you guys? Will we be seeing the finished product soon?

Eric Church: We're in the home stretch now, so we're doing a lot of play balancing and working on the final touches. So, you'll definitely see Finest Hour this fall.

GameSpy: We've seen a lot about the single player game, but is there any chance you can tell us about the multiplayer aspects?

Eric Church: Sure thing, we're working hard on multiplayer too. We're working together with the folks at Kuju, who've been great. So, multiplayer is shaping up to be a great complement to the intense single player missions. You can look for online multiplayer on both PS2 and Xbox. We've got multiple team-based modes and we're still testing for up to 16 players for online.